"The generations that preceded ours were marked by wanting to improve, wanting to be free, and wanting to be educated, but this generation just wants to be amused."
"The good old days weren't all that good and tomorrow's not as bad as it seems."
Why did I waste my time with those books and classes 20 years ago? Maybe to learn about the PROTESTANT REFORMATION. What's "the Protestant Revolution?"
I have a friend in seminary now. I wonder if this could take the place of her history class.
You may have heard that there's another speech going on at the Lincoln Memorial today.
Perhaps it's a good day to remember this one.
When Boston’s dour Puritan preachers embraced markets as a moral good three and a half centuries ago, it was a watershed in the formation of the American economy and the national character.This idea come from Mark Valeri's book, "Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America" and claims that, when life got rough in Puritan America, those who used to disdain the market as evil, started seeing that it was necessary to have some economic growth to get the country on track. It was, perhaps, self-preservation that got some of our more conservative religious folk on the capitalism bandwagon...all in the name of Jesus.
[He] preached during a period when Boston merchants believed that their occupation was essential to the commonweal — to England’s prosperity and therefore to Protestantism and liberty. Their strategies to convey goods, credit, and power throughout the British Atlantic proved them to be patrons of the empire. Many moralists, Willard included, valorized them in such terms. His successors, leading Boston pastors of the 1710s, 1720s, and 1730s, went further. They, along with their parishioners, sanctioned the practices that guaranteed economic success as moral mandates, and the rules that governed commercial exchange as natural and divine laws. Their convictions informed a market culture that, by many accounts, came to maturity by 1750 and provided motives for rebellion against the British Empire after the cessation of war with France.
